The Potato-Salad Guy Should Keep Every Penny

First, the plain, strange facts (which you may already know): on Thursday, July 3rd, a young man in Columbus, Ohio, by the name Zack (Danger) Brown launched a campaign on Kickstarter, the crowdfunding Web site, to raise money to make potato salad. He offered no business plan or proof of concept. Brown did not claim that his potato salad would be the next cupcake (R.I.P.) or cronut. “Basically, I’m just making potato salad. I haven’t decided what kind yet,” he wrote. He asked for ten dollars. By Wednesday afternoon, he had received pledges amounting to more than seventy grand. (Update: As of Thursday morning, that total had dipped to a little more than forty thousand dollars, with some earlier pledges having been cancelled.)

Kickstarter, in its user guidelines, offers advice to potential investors on how to identify a trustworthy campaign: “Backers should look for creators who share a clear plan for how their project will be completed and who have a history of doing so.” Brown, by his own description, was a bad bet. “It might not be that good,” he wrote. “It’s my first potato salad.” And yet the money keeps rolling in, thanks to more than three hundred thousand shares of Brown’s funding page on Facebook and extensive coverage and discussion, from Reddit to “Good Morning America.” Much of the funding has come in the form of small donations of a dollar or two, but according to Brown’s project page more than eighty people have donated over fifty dollars. These élite donors, members of a category that Brown has dubbed “Potato Salads of the World,” are slated to receive all kinds of rewards, including a bite of potato salad delivered to their homes, none of which seem especially feasible or likely to materialize.

Why are people giving money to a stranger who has barely even promised to make a dish of potato salad? Depending on one’s sense of humor, the deadpan, unassuming nature of the plan—its odd simplicity—is simply funny. “Best laugh I had in a while,” wrote one funder, who gave two bucks. Another wrote, “I pledge to him, not to receive a photo of the potato salad, but because I love the idea of pledging to a potato salad. It makes me happy when people are not dead serious about everything.” The money isn’t a donation to some future accomplishment but a gift for the existing one of having spread low-key joy across the Internet.

This, of course, is not what Kickstarter is set up to do, and until recently the company vetted campaigns, looking for rigorous, serious fund-raising projects. Some donors have used Brown’s potato-salad goof as a way of critiquing the new free-for-all feel of the platform or to mock the tone of Kickstarter campaigns in general (which have been mounted by small-timers and movie-making celebrities alike). The more famous the project became, and the more objections that were raised by those who were befuddled or miffed by its success, the more money it earned. As one nicely foulmouthed user explained, “I’m giving a buck simply for the amusement and surrealism factor. And to give a big fuck off to the self-righteous pissants out there.”

Brown’s potato-salad campaign has moved swiftly through the Internet life stages, from inception to mass awareness to copycats. Among the comments on Brown’s page are links to all kinds of other hop-on projects: Idaho potatoes for the potato-salad party that Brown has promised to throw in Ohio; beer for the party, too. There are at least two competing campaigns for coleslaw. These latecomers have received scant support, evidence that this kind of thing can work only once. But there are other people competing for attention in the comments, as well, asking for more basic and urgent kinds of help through the personal fund-raising site GoFundMe—people who say they are about to be evicted from their homes or need money to turn their lives around and go back to school. In the face of these pleas, a reminder of humans in need in real life, many commentators have noted that there is something galling, if not downright obscene, about all this potato money.

At Slate, Jordan Weissmann has taken the position, twice, that Brown should give the money to charity, perhaps to a local food bank. While the symmetry of this is appealing—potato salad for everybody—it seems based on a basic misreading of this mini-phenomenon: that, essentially, the money itself is some kind of ill-gotten gain, an accidental and undeserved windfall that is tainted by its curious origins, and so should simply be given away. But Kickstarter is not a fund-raising platform for charity; in fact, its official regulations forbid it. No one gave Brown their money with the expectation that he would necessarily do anything with it, good or bad, short of probably, eventually, making some potato salad.

On Tuesday, Brown went on “Good Morning America,” and in the form of bland seriousness the weird fun of the experiment reached its end. The show’s panel of six hosts brought him out, and, in trying to make sense of things, they couldn’t quite manage to hide looks of vague disgust. Robin Roberts asked Brown what he was going to do with the money. Brown paused and turned earnest: “I want to do the most good I can do with this,” he said. He talked about how Kickstarter doesn’t allow fund-raisers to give money directly to charity, but said that he was open to ideas about how to put the money to good use. Brown, suddenly speaking like some N.G.O. guy giving a TED talk, went on about “how we can take this moment, this campaign, and this money and do the most good with it.” The well-paid panel of talking heads murmured their assent, relieved that Brown had turned out to be such a decent guy, saying the expected things about changing the world instead of simply pumping his fists in delight at his sudden payday. “I feel so much better about this,” George Stephanopoulos said.

I’m glad that Stephanopoulos feels better, but why did he feel bad in the first place? A friend of mine, who, over the objections of his wife, donated a dollar to Brown’s lark, told me that he considered the project’s viral success an example of someone winning the Internet lottery. Of course, Brown’s windfall isn’t fair to serious people on Kickstarter whose ideas have been ignored, or to hardworking single parents struggling to feed their families, or to the hungry and desperate everywhere. Brown struck a bit of gold, while others pan hopelessly. But to pretend that a reward is always (or even ever) commensurate with the amount of work one does is to misconstrue how the world works. If potato salad leads people to reflect on the injustices of modern American capitalism, then we really may be on to something. For now, though, I will reluctantly join the chorus of sudden advice-givers: Brown should do whatever he wants with his money.

Ian Crouch is a writer and producer for newyorker.com, where he began working in 2009.